Spotify has acknowledged an issue that’s causing some of its paid Premium subscribers to encounter ads when trying to play music. In an X post published on Thursday by Spotify’s customer service account, the company said it’s looking into the problem and linked to its Community website where the issue has been documented by users over the past four weeks.
However, the company clarified to TechCrunch that the current issue has a different cause from the bug that had been previously reported by users.
It said a small number of users were affected by the problem and its teams have deployed a fix. (The X account has not yet posted that the fix was released, as of the time of writing, and is still responding to user complaints by suggesting workarounds, like logging out and back in.)
According to user reports on Spotify’s site and elsewhere on the web, Premium users who faced the issue became frustrated as they were paying for an ad-free experience, but were still forced to hear ads. Suggested solutions, like logging out, haven’t worked, either, many said.
The issue had affected people across mobile, desktop, and web, the reports indicated.
Some of the users also noted the issue was not on their side.
For instance, they made sure their payment information was up-to-date before registering a complaint on Spotify’s site. Others had demanded a refund since they were paying for an upgraded experience they did not receive.
The issue with the buggy Premium tier follows news that Spotify will soon launch new subscription tiers, including a “superfan” offering that will include a deeper music and video catalog and other fan experiences. WMG is a partner in the new effort.
Spotify competitor YouTube this week launched a Premium Lite subscription, offering ad-free videos outside of music content. The more affordable $7.99 per month subscription won’t include access to YouTube Music or other features like background play and downloads.
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Reddit announced on Thursday it’s introducing a set of new tools to make it easier for users to participate on its platform. The features are designed to help users find communities, ensure their posts don’t break any rules, and understand how to contribute across the social network.
Combined, the features are meant to enhance the Redditor posting experience by making it easier to contribute posts, particularly for newer users who may not understand how Reddit works or where to post.
For starters, the company says it will start helping users find the right community for their audience with “Community Suggestions.”
If a user has created a post and is unsure which community to post it in, a “Pick a Community” dropdown will now offer relevant subreddit recommendations based on the post’s content. This, Reddit believes, will make it easier for users to connect with the right audience when creating a new post.
Another new “Post Check” feature will help users determine if their post might be breaking any of the subreddit rules so they can update it before publishing. The idea behind this feature is to help users who may otherwise have accidentally broken rules and had their post removed.
Users can access the tool by clicking the wand icon in the lower right-hand corner of the post composer. After that, the tool will highlight any content that may have broken a rule.
Reddit is also rolling out a tool that will allow users to repost content that was removed to a different subreddit. When a user’s post is removed due to community rules, they will see a new prompt under that post that will help them repost the content to a suggested alternative subreddit.
Plus, when users select a community to post in, but don’t meet that community’s criteria, Reddit will now offer recommendations for how they can contribute to that community. For instance, Reddit may notify you that you’re unable to contribute to a community because you don’t meet the minimum criteria for karma (an online reputation score), and that you need to earn more by posting or commenting across Reddit.
In addition, Reddit improved its “Post Insights” feature to allow users to see how well their posts are doing. Now, you can see the dates related to your views, upvotes, shares, and more.
With this information, Reddit users will be able to understand what performs well to help refine their approach for future posts.
All the new features are available starting today on mobile and desktop to users worldwide, the company says.
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As part of the iOS 18.4 software update, currently in public beta, Apple is introducing AI-powered summaries of App Store reviews. The new feature will leverage Apple Intelligence, the company’s built-in AI technology, to offer an overall summary based on the reviews others have left on the App Store.
The review summaries will be generated by large language models (LLMs) and will highlight key information into a short paragraph, Apple’s website explains. The summaries will also be refreshed weekly for apps and games that have enough reviews to generate a summary — though Apple did not say what that threshold is.
App Store users can tap and hold on the review to report any problems with the feature while app developers can alert Apple to problems via App Store Connect.
AI summaries will first be in the U.S. in English and will later roll out to all apps with a sufficient number of reviews in additional markets and languages over the course of the year. It will also be available in iPadOS 18.4.
The feature, first spotted by Macworld in the recent beta release, may encourage unscrupulous app developers to flood their ratings and review sections with fake reviews left by bots or other paid commenters who praise the app or game or make positive remarks about its features or pricing.
While this sort of thing is unfortunately already a common practice in the app industry — or really, any on any site that offers customer reviews of a product — adding AI summaries could worsen the problem. Consumers may begin to rely too heavily on the review summary itself instead of more carefully reading through all reviews, both good and bad.
The feature also tests the ability of Apple’s AI to carefully extract and parse any negative comments or concerns in the App Store reviews and highlight them for customers in these AI summaries.
Apple is not the only tech giant to look to AI for analyzing reviews. Amazon introduced AI summaries for product reviews on its platform back in 2023. Google’s Gemini AI can also be used for product reviews summaries, as one developer tutorial explains. The company also added AI-powered review summaries in Google Maps last year.
While the AI summaries are available now to beta testers with the latest release (iOS 18.4, beta 2 and iPadOS 18.4, beta 2), the feature will reach the general public in April when the new software rolls out to all.
Other anticipated features include an expanded set of Apple Intelligence languages that are supported, access to Apple Intelligence for EU users, access to Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro, new Control Center options for Siri, and an AI-powered feature to prioritize important notifications over others.
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